LIST OF PANELS

Comparative public policy and comparative politics have often run on parallel tracks.  Researchers in both fields are typically explaining public policies; public policies such as labor market or welfare state decisions are staple topics in comparative politics. But the two fields are often using different conceptual languages, theories, and citations. Issues and theories such as implementation, agenda-setting, incrementalism and advocacy coalitions rarely appear in comparative politics literature, while partisanship, state structure, and broader political economy issues such as industrial relations are rarely prominent in public policy writing. The result is a lost opportunity- for comparative politics to benefit from expertise in policy analysis and research, and for comparative public policy to more fully engage with comparative politics theories and methods.This panel explores the relationship between the two fields, asking how they do and might relate. Topics that papers might address include: Theoretical frameworks and levels of analysis. How do comparative politics approaches, focused on institutions, parties, and coalitions fit with the more finely grained analyses, such as network or agenda-setting approaches, often found in public policy theories? How can their relationship be complementary, or are they rivals? What is the relationship between subject field expertise, in an area such as environmental, educational, or social policy and broader political analysis such as found in comparative political economy? What cross-fertilization can there be between the methods associated with comparative politics and comparative public policy? Literature reviews and practical, theoretically informed, applications of public policy and comparative politics theories will be especially welcome.

The field of comparative public policy is, in large part, an extension of the field of public policy as it developed in various countries. The focus of comparative public policy studies, like domestic public policy studies in most countries, involves a focus on the policy process and policies from a single area. Theoretical perspectives that focus on the micro- or meso-level and discuss policymaking processes are the mainstay of theories of the policy process, ranging from American theories such as those of advocacy coalitions and multiple-streams theories to theories of programmatic elites and social construction associated with French studies of public policy. This history and set of focuses puts it in an interesting relationship with the large field of comparative politics. Comparative politics often studies the same topics; key comparative politics literatures focus on the growth of the welfare state, industrial relations, and development of comparative political economy. The theories, however, tend to be broader-brush and the emphasis is on broader societal processes and developments such as partisanship, the structure of political institutions, or big societal coalitions, inspired by, for example, the works of Barrington Moore or Stein Rokkan. There are points of overlap, notably in rational choice and historical institutionalist perspectives, but even so it is usually easy to distinguish between (for example) the institutionalism of comparativists like Kathleen Thelen and Peter Hall from the institutionalism of policy scholars (examples?), just as the rational choice perspectives of Peter Dunleavy or Charles Shipan, in public policy, are distinguishable from the rational choice studies of comparative politics scholars such as David Soskice or George Tsebelis. We propose that this panel provide an opportunity to reflect on the potential for cross-fertilization between comparative politics and comparative public policy. What can each field, with their different (and internationally diverse) traditions of enquiry and explanation, bring to the other? How can the study of comparative public policy enrich comparative politics, which is often quite weak in its analysis of the mechanisms of policymaking, and what can the field of comparative politics, with its rich theoretical legacies, contribute to a field of comparative public policy that is more focused on micro- and mid-level theories of policy processes and areas?